The present invention relates to a system and a method enabling a cost-effective, high-fidelity, three-dimensional modeling of a large-scale urban environment.
With the proliferation of the Internet, online views of the real world became available to everybody. From static, graphic, two-dimensional maps to live video from web cams, a user can receive many kinds of information on practically any place in the world. Obviously, urban environments are of a great interest to a large number of users.
However, visualization of urban environments is complex and challenging. There exist three-dimensional models of urban environment that are also available online. These models enable a user to navigate through an urban environment and determine the preferred viewing angle. Such three-dimensional urban models are rather sketchy and therefore cannot provide the user the experience of roving through “true” urban places.
The terms “virtual city”, “cybertown” or “digital city” frequently appearing on the Web and in other computer applications, are being employed for a variety of information contents and interfaces. An important distinction has to be made in the type of various virtual cities. The following description helps to elucidate this distinction.
“Flat” virtual cities use “flat” image maps of buildings and streets as a static interface. In many cases stylized town maps of familiar landmarks and buildings are used as graphical icons to further online information.
Three-dimensional virtual cities use visual simulation, and/or virtual reality technologies, to model the urban built to varying degrees of accuracy and realism. Such virtual cities are usually navigable in the sense that the user can walk around and fly through the scene. The recently launched Google Earth service features very crude 3D representations (“box-models”) of over 30 major US cities. In more intricate 3D-city models, buildings are represented as 3D polygons with textures to add realism. Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is often used to create such sites, although they are seldom compiled using accurate base map data as geodetic foundation and generally cover only a small part of the city.
Precise “cyber-copies” of actual cities that give their users genuine sense and perception of “real” urban places do not exist yet in commercial applications.
Most of the existing activities aimed at creating “true” virtual cities with photo-realistic built, richness and fullness of geo-referenced information content, crucial to support professional applications and social interaction between the users in a most meaningful and intuitive way, are still at their early research stages.
Currently practiced methodologies to produce precise and complete 3D-city models are extremely laborious and time-consuming. They lead to excessive production cost and schedule, and do not represent a commercially acceptable solution for constructing full-size city models anywhere in the world.
A major productivity improvement in data collection and 3D modeling is needed for transforming the existing high-fidelity urban modeling tools into an industrially viable solution.
There is thus a widely recognized need for, and it would be highly advantageous to have, a system and method for creating a high-fidelity 3D-model of large-scale urban environments, devoid of the above limitations.